I just noticed that I missed noting the anniversary of this blog on February 3!
One of the odd things about reading John Dies @ the End, by "David Wong" (a pseudonym for Jason Pargin) is that John first seems to die on page 59 (but it's only an illusion), and he literally gets the last word on the final page, 371, proving that the title itself is yet another in a long line of possibly clever but ultimately headache-inducing illusions.
The book was initially written as an internet serial at www.johndiesattheend.com, and it shows. The story escalates from one bloody battle to the next, adding levels of surrealism until its readers can hardly remember what realism might have looked like.
Despite these drawbacks, however, the humorous tone of voice and the riddles kept me reading. In fact, the reason I decided to read the book was that I read the prologue, which is a riddle, and quite a peculiar and funny one.
I was amused by the tone of voice in this passage, which keeps it from being just another cliche-ridden musing on mortality:
"People die. This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truh about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you'll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there'll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.
I was lucky. I learned this a long time ago, in a tiny, stifling room behind my high school gym. Most people don't realize it until they're laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.
And no one cares. You kick and scream and cry out into the darkness, and no answer comes. You rage against the unfathomable injustice and two blocks away some guy watches a baseball game and scratches his balls.
Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is. Well I know. It's apathy. That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck."
The tone of one passage even reminds me of the "missing reunion scene" between Westley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride:
"We kissed and said some gooey things to each other that would sound silly if you weren't there. I stood around and waited for her to board, passing through security and letting them check her shoes and all that shit, watched her walk away and kept watching out of a terminal window as her plane climbed and turned into a speck in the sky. I didn't cry. And if you think I did, good luck proving it, asshole."
Occasionally the humorous tone of voice saves something derivative from seeming so; when the image of a man made of cockroaches threatens to become a mere imitation of the "bug man" from the movie Men in Black, the narrator says:
"you see people in horror movies standing there stupidly while some special effect takes shape before them, the dumb-asses gawking at it instead of turning and running like the wind. And I wanted to run, to do the smart thing. But this was my car, dammit." I also enjoy John's observation, as the thing drives off: "I knew that was gonna happen."
The ultimate mystery turns out to depend on an Ender's-Game-like deception, although again, the tone of voice in which this is revealed is amusing enough to defuse some of the similarity:
"I'm not tellin' you these games have been around and I'm such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn't exist before last month. And now they're everywhere, on every TV set and hey, ask around and people say they've been common for years and years. I'm a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn't sell these games before, I know they didn't because it's insane that they do at all. But I start seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that's training him. Tell me it ain't. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hours and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside."
The descriptions of beings from other dimensions are entertaining, too, usually presented in terms of animal likenesses:
"The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.
You heard me.
John said the thing was as tall as the truck and walked on six legs that looked horned and armored like something seen at a seafood buffet. But there was a part that had the feel of a mammal, too, fur and arms. Please remember that from John's distance the beast would have been the size of a dime, so I won't criticize his crab-riding monkey description even though we all know it's retarded."
Although this book does sometimes descend to the level of a ten-year-old boy who labels something that's not quite right "retarded," its humorous tone, the riddles, and the sheer inventiveness of the plot and characters kept me reading.
Showing posts with label Orson Scott Card. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orson Scott Card. Show all posts
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Prequels and Sequels
Among the books I read but don't always review are prequels and sequels to books I've previously enjoyed. Often I think well, I should have known better. Rarely am I disappointed enough to feel the need to complain in writing.
Recently, though, I've had a spell of disappointment in my reading diet. I read a prequel to a book I loved and found it was nowhere near as good. I read a self-published first novel by an author who had a good story to tell but needed a good editor. And then I read a sequel to a book I thought had explored some interesting and even important points of view on American politics, to find that the sequel presents only one biased, limited, and--to me at least, disturbing--point of view.
Orson Scott Card's novel Empire was both thought-provoking and a good story, so I could hardly wait to read Hidden Empire when it came out. But I should have waited... forever. Nothing can completely spoil Card's amazing ability to tell a story, but it's hard for me to enjoy a story when I don't like any of the characters. By the end of Hidden Empire I absolutely hated one of the main characters, a man I had liked and admired in Empire. He shoots down all of his former friends on a flimsy ideological pretext and then stands around shaking hands with himself and being held up by the author as a person to admire. Bullshit, Card.
I have always been willing to love Card's fiction (no matter how much of a wacko I think he is in real life), but now he's gone too far trying to turn his fiction into a sermon. I can be patient with that, like when Barbara Kingsolver did it in Prodigal Summer and next turned to writing non-fiction to produce the much better Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But the sermon Card is trying to preach isn't even a good sermon. It's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount: "blessed are the self-righteous, for they will see their way clear to blowing all their enemies to Kingdom Come." If there's a non-fiction follow-up to that one, count me out.
Stotan! by Chris Crutcher, is a prequel of sorts to Whale Talk, which I think is a terrific book. And the main character in it is a boy named Walker. Seriously, how could I not like this book? And yet I didn't, much. I don't really understand the need to train for a sport until--much less past the point that--it hurts, which is what the "stotans," a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan, do. The parts of the novel about why people are prejudiced and what's the best way to respond to tragedy or treat people of the opposite sex were done better in Whale Talk, as if it is the culmination of Crutcher's ability to work through those issues with some of these same characters.
So why am I complaining about my reading disappointments? I think every once in a while people who talk about books should talk about the books we didn't like much. We all want to talk about the books that make us glad we've read them, but if we never contrast the ones that make us feel we've wasted our time, then we sound like people who are constantly enthusiastic--maybe over stuff that others might find mediocre. So I decided to complain today, as part of my continuing effort to be a fox in the henhouse.
Have you read anything lately that turned out to be a disappointment?
Recently, though, I've had a spell of disappointment in my reading diet. I read a prequel to a book I loved and found it was nowhere near as good. I read a self-published first novel by an author who had a good story to tell but needed a good editor. And then I read a sequel to a book I thought had explored some interesting and even important points of view on American politics, to find that the sequel presents only one biased, limited, and--to me at least, disturbing--point of view.
Orson Scott Card's novel Empire was both thought-provoking and a good story, so I could hardly wait to read Hidden Empire when it came out. But I should have waited... forever. Nothing can completely spoil Card's amazing ability to tell a story, but it's hard for me to enjoy a story when I don't like any of the characters. By the end of Hidden Empire I absolutely hated one of the main characters, a man I had liked and admired in Empire. He shoots down all of his former friends on a flimsy ideological pretext and then stands around shaking hands with himself and being held up by the author as a person to admire. Bullshit, Card.
I have always been willing to love Card's fiction (no matter how much of a wacko I think he is in real life), but now he's gone too far trying to turn his fiction into a sermon. I can be patient with that, like when Barbara Kingsolver did it in Prodigal Summer and next turned to writing non-fiction to produce the much better Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. But the sermon Card is trying to preach isn't even a good sermon. It's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount: "blessed are the self-righteous, for they will see their way clear to blowing all their enemies to Kingdom Come." If there's a non-fiction follow-up to that one, count me out.
Stotan! by Chris Crutcher, is a prequel of sorts to Whale Talk, which I think is a terrific book. And the main character in it is a boy named Walker. Seriously, how could I not like this book? And yet I didn't, much. I don't really understand the need to train for a sport until--much less past the point that--it hurts, which is what the "stotans," a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan, do. The parts of the novel about why people are prejudiced and what's the best way to respond to tragedy or treat people of the opposite sex were done better in Whale Talk, as if it is the culmination of Crutcher's ability to work through those issues with some of these same characters.
So why am I complaining about my reading disappointments? I think every once in a while people who talk about books should talk about the books we didn't like much. We all want to talk about the books that make us glad we've read them, but if we never contrast the ones that make us feel we've wasted our time, then we sound like people who are constantly enthusiastic--maybe over stuff that others might find mediocre. So I decided to complain today, as part of my continuing effort to be a fox in the henhouse.
Have you read anything lately that turned out to be a disappointment?
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Graveyard Book
I was sick on Mother's Day. I mean waking-up-at-midnight-not-able-to-breathe sick, lying-in-bed-with-a-fever sick, and not-even-wanting-anyone-to-bring-me-anything-to-drink sick. And while I was lying there, becatted and with the life of the household going on around me, I read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Because it seemed appropriate when I felt like death.
I'd already read the short story "The Witch's Headstone," in Gaiman's short story collection entitled M is for Magic. That story comprises one of the chapters of The Graveyard Book, which tells most of the story of Bod's childhood, including how and why he got his unusual name ("Bod" is short for "Nobody"). I usually love reading full-length stories that were originally based on short stories (Orson Scott Card's The Lost Boys was one of the first of that kind that I knew about and loved), and this book is no exception.
Although I was absolutely thrilled with the illustration on the first page-- "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife" and you SEE the hand with the knife--I didn't care of the rest of the illustrations. If anything, I found them distracting. When I'm reading, I form pictures in my mind, and they were nothing like the illustrations, which consequently struck me as cheesy and wrong. But as my regular readers can tell, I'm not a big fan of the visual. I think text speaks for itself. Give me the thousand words over the one picture any day. So even though I loved reading illustrated stories to my children when they were young (especially Dr. Seuss and William Joyce), I'm not a fan of illustrations in general. I have never cared for comic books or animated movies. Take my criticism of the illustrations, therefore, with those big grains of salt.
From the moment that the ghostly Mrs. Owens refuses to give up the living baby that has come into the graveyard, I was completely hooked by this improbable story. Instead of "it takes a village," in this story "it takes a graveyard" to raise a child, and his adventures and what he learns from the dead folks makes for an oddly old-fashioned style of story-telling.
Not all of the story is aimed simply at younger readers. One of my favorite parts is when young Bod comes to a dead poet, Nehemiah Trot, for advice, thinking "really...if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?" He asks Nehemiah to tell him about revenge:
"'Dish best served cold,' said Nehemiah Trot. 'Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O'Leary--and Irishman, I should add--who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentlemen of Quality, that if was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as--no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.'
'But you got your revenge on him?' asked Bod, curious.
'On him and on his entire pestilent breed! Oh, I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published, a letter, which I nailed to the doors of the public houses in London where such low scribbling folk were wont to frequent. And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems--for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be bburied with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost--lost!--only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.'
'And after you died, they dug you up, and they printed the poems?'
'Not yet, no. But there is still plenty of time. Posterity is vast.'
'So...that was your revenge?'
'Indeed. And a mightily powerful and cunning one at that!'
'Ye-es,' said Bod, unconvinced.
Even with such help, Bod manages to learn right from wrong, and wisdom from foolishness. At the end of the story he's about fifteen years old, and one of the dead folks that's helped raise him, "Mother Slaughter," (whose headstone is so old that some of the letters no longer show up and has puzzled visitors for years as to why it says "laughter") says to him:
"I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
Maybe I liked that passage merely because my father once said something similar to me, about looking in the mirror and wondering who that old man was, when he still felt like he did when he was younger. But there are other passages like it, and they raise the story above the level of a simple children's tale.
It might even be fun to read when you're not sick. Is there a certain kind of book you tend to read when you're sick? I usually tend more towards the slow literary kind of book when I'm not feeling well, but this time I just picked up what was beside my bed.
I'd already read the short story "The Witch's Headstone," in Gaiman's short story collection entitled M is for Magic. That story comprises one of the chapters of The Graveyard Book, which tells most of the story of Bod's childhood, including how and why he got his unusual name ("Bod" is short for "Nobody"). I usually love reading full-length stories that were originally based on short stories (Orson Scott Card's The Lost Boys was one of the first of that kind that I knew about and loved), and this book is no exception.
Although I was absolutely thrilled with the illustration on the first page-- "There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife" and you SEE the hand with the knife--I didn't care of the rest of the illustrations. If anything, I found them distracting. When I'm reading, I form pictures in my mind, and they were nothing like the illustrations, which consequently struck me as cheesy and wrong. But as my regular readers can tell, I'm not a big fan of the visual. I think text speaks for itself. Give me the thousand words over the one picture any day. So even though I loved reading illustrated stories to my children when they were young (especially Dr. Seuss and William Joyce), I'm not a fan of illustrations in general. I have never cared for comic books or animated movies. Take my criticism of the illustrations, therefore, with those big grains of salt.
From the moment that the ghostly Mrs. Owens refuses to give up the living baby that has come into the graveyard, I was completely hooked by this improbable story. Instead of "it takes a village," in this story "it takes a graveyard" to raise a child, and his adventures and what he learns from the dead folks makes for an oddly old-fashioned style of story-telling.
Not all of the story is aimed simply at younger readers. One of my favorite parts is when young Bod comes to a dead poet, Nehemiah Trot, for advice, thinking "really...if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?" He asks Nehemiah to tell him about revenge:
"'Dish best served cold,' said Nehemiah Trot. 'Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O'Leary--and Irishman, I should add--who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentlemen of Quality, that if was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as--no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.'
'But you got your revenge on him?' asked Bod, curious.
'On him and on his entire pestilent breed! Oh, I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published, a letter, which I nailed to the doors of the public houses in London where such low scribbling folk were wont to frequent. And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems--for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be bburied with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost--lost!--only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.'
'And after you died, they dug you up, and they printed the poems?'
'Not yet, no. But there is still plenty of time. Posterity is vast.'
'So...that was your revenge?'
'Indeed. And a mightily powerful and cunning one at that!'
'Ye-es,' said Bod, unconvinced.
Even with such help, Bod manages to learn right from wrong, and wisdom from foolishness. At the end of the story he's about fifteen years old, and one of the dead folks that's helped raise him, "Mother Slaughter," (whose headstone is so old that some of the letters no longer show up and has puzzled visitors for years as to why it says "laughter") says to him:
"I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
Maybe I liked that passage merely because my father once said something similar to me, about looking in the mirror and wondering who that old man was, when he still felt like he did when he was younger. But there are other passages like it, and they raise the story above the level of a simple children's tale.
It might even be fun to read when you're not sick. Is there a certain kind of book you tend to read when you're sick? I usually tend more towards the slow literary kind of book when I'm not feeling well, but this time I just picked up what was beside my bed.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
A New Ender Book
It's been KILLING me to pass it by in bookstores, it really has. Finally last evening I found it at the library. I was dropping off a kid and almost didn't go in to see what was new, but then I did, and the new Ender book was there, and I couldn't do anything but read it the rest of the night. And it's good. Entitled Ender in Exile, this one is billed as a "direct sequel to Ender's Game," and it ties together some of the wider context from the Ender's Shadow series with the continuation of the story from the Speaker for the Dead series. I found it so immensely satisfying that, despite what I've said about buying any more books by Orson Scott Card, I'm eventually going to search for a used copy, because I have to own this one, along with all the others in the series.
There aren't too many other living writers who can keep me turning pages like Orson Scott Card. And, against all odds, his talent as a storyteller reasserts itself even in the midst of his attempt to keep all the myriad details of the Ender universe straight. There were moments when I surfaced enough to marvel at the continuity. Mostly, though, I was glued to the story, enjoying being with Ender and Valentine once again, and finding out what happened to Bean and Petra's missing child.
The philosophical undercurrent of the novel, how it is possible to live ethically and fight against evil, seems a little less consistent to me than the details of the various character timelines. Although Ender shows the little colonist, Abra, that it's pointless to be proud of a talent you're born with, he literally trusts his life, at one point, to the idea that a person will live up to the nobility of his genetic heritage, rather than succumb to the venality of the way he was raised.
Still, if you love stories that have multiple endings from various points of view, you'll love seeing the way Ender and his parents and Graff find some resolutions to the problems of "evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and...." But "the good end happily, and the bad, unhappily. That is what fiction is." At least the page-turner kind.
There aren't too many other living writers who can keep me turning pages like Orson Scott Card. And, against all odds, his talent as a storyteller reasserts itself even in the midst of his attempt to keep all the myriad details of the Ender universe straight. There were moments when I surfaced enough to marvel at the continuity. Mostly, though, I was glued to the story, enjoying being with Ender and Valentine once again, and finding out what happened to Bean and Petra's missing child.
The philosophical undercurrent of the novel, how it is possible to live ethically and fight against evil, seems a little less consistent to me than the details of the various character timelines. Although Ender shows the little colonist, Abra, that it's pointless to be proud of a talent you're born with, he literally trusts his life, at one point, to the idea that a person will live up to the nobility of his genetic heritage, rather than succumb to the venality of the way he was raised.
Still, if you love stories that have multiple endings from various points of view, you'll love seeing the way Ender and his parents and Graff find some resolutions to the problems of "evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and...." But "the good end happily, and the bad, unhappily. That is what fiction is." At least the page-turner kind.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Sometimes It's Important to Take a Stand
The Booking Through Thursday question (Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?) has continued to stir up a controversy that I helped to begin, however inadvertently, with a comment about why I will no longer buy books by Orson Scott Card on Maw Books Blog. If I had been thinking at all, I probably wouldn't have left the initial comment, because I didn't realize that the blog author is a Mormon, as Card is. But now that I have spoken without thinking, I find myself in the position of having to take a stand, and I'll do it without any more apology to Natasha, who seems to be a lovely person, because I don't think that all Mormons spread hate of homosexuals any more than I believe all Roman Catholics are from big families or all Muslims are terrorists.
As I've said in several places (Hey, Lady, Watcha Readin'? for example), I'm usually not aware of an author's views, and it wouldn't make any difference to my enjoyment of their fiction if I were. But I do have issues I feel strongly about, and I think anyone who has a public forum, however small, is obligated to speak out about issues they see as wrong, lest they perpetuate that wrongness by failing to object. The most horrifying examples of perpetuating evil by failing to speak out against it are the Germans who managed not to notice the concentration camps in their country, and the slaveowners who thought it was enough not to mistreat their own slaves, while the neighbors' slaves were suffering untold (literally) agonies. A more recent example of the dangers of thinking that the "live and let live" philosophy is enough is Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder (see my post on that here).
I can't imagine being "put off an author's books after reading a biography of them." Not reading is never the answer! But financially supporting an author I disagree with so vehemently--and who is so public in his support of what I consider evil--is not something I want anyone to do. Even though his books are wonderful. Read them, but get them from the library.
As I've said in several places (Hey, Lady, Watcha Readin'? for example), I'm usually not aware of an author's views, and it wouldn't make any difference to my enjoyment of their fiction if I were. But I do have issues I feel strongly about, and I think anyone who has a public forum, however small, is obligated to speak out about issues they see as wrong, lest they perpetuate that wrongness by failing to object. The most horrifying examples of perpetuating evil by failing to speak out against it are the Germans who managed not to notice the concentration camps in their country, and the slaveowners who thought it was enough not to mistreat their own slaves, while the neighbors' slaves were suffering untold (literally) agonies. A more recent example of the dangers of thinking that the "live and let live" philosophy is enough is Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder (see my post on that here).
I can't imagine being "put off an author's books after reading a biography of them." Not reading is never the answer! But financially supporting an author I disagree with so vehemently--and who is so public in his support of what I consider evil--is not something I want anyone to do. Even though his books are wonderful. Read them, but get them from the library.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Notoriety
After reading Orson Scott Card's lunatic ravings on the subject of gay marriage (http://mormontimes.com), I have trouble thinking about buying any more of his books, because that would mean I was supporting his particular brand of church-related lunacy. That he's a good writer makes it worse that he's trying to stir up hate. My little revenge is removing his blog from my sidebar.
One of the commenters on John Scalzi's blog post about Card's ravings (http://scalzi.com/whatever) compares him to Ezra Pound, which strikes me as right on the mark. Sure, I read Ezra Pound, but that doesn't mean I agree with his support of fascism any more than watching a Tom Cruise movie means I want to give money to Scientology.
The thing is, I don't think my little boycott of Card will make any difference. What will? Um, writing about how I disagree with his views? Boy, do I. You can call it by any name you want, but gay people ought to be legally entitled to form a legal union in this country, and it's way past time for our laws to guarantee that in every state.
How much difference should a writer's wacko views make to how--or whether--you read his fiction? If someone is notorious in real life, reading about that is obviously almost as much fun as reading what he wrote. Do we still believe in reading things like Lives of the Saints in order to imitate them more perfectly? Consider this poem by Louis Simpson, Lives of the Poets:
Dickinson had a cockatoo
she called Semiramis
and loved dearly.
Whitman was a trencherman,
his favorite dish
a mulligan stew.
Frost went for long walks,
Eliot played croquet,
Pound took fencing lessons.
There is a snapshot of Yeats
in a garden with a woman
naked to the waist and smiling.
Auden when he was old
counted the sheets of toilet paper
that a visitor used.
And speaking of toilet paper, wasn't there something in the entertainment columns a few months ago about how Sheryl Crow wants to ration how much we can use for one visit?
I guess I usually think that a writer's notoriety is beside the point, and the work should be judged on its own merits. But many of my favorite works of literature are topical satires, which can't be removed from their historical context without removing that which makes them comprehensible, much less funny or perceptive or clever.
Does it help you, my readers, to decipher my tone today if I tell you that I had a traffic accident in Columbus yesterday about noon, which didn't hurt any people but damaged my minivan so severely that I couldn't even drive it home, but had to leave it in Columbus awaiting an insurance estimate and then, someday, repairs? And that even though I was the meat in a car sandwich and felt like I couldn't have done anything differently without hurting people, the state trooper who kept us in the noonday sun for two hours gave me a $110 ticket for not having "assured clear distance" from the man ahead of me who threw on his brakes so suddenly that the force of the collision from the car behind me sent the hood of my van partially under his bumper? Did you hear all that in my annoyance today?
Didn't think so. And, of course, I'm not a famous writer. But does it matter--do we need to be always paying attention to "the man behind the curtain" as we read?
One of the commenters on John Scalzi's blog post about Card's ravings (http://scalzi.com/whatever) compares him to Ezra Pound, which strikes me as right on the mark. Sure, I read Ezra Pound, but that doesn't mean I agree with his support of fascism any more than watching a Tom Cruise movie means I want to give money to Scientology.
The thing is, I don't think my little boycott of Card will make any difference. What will? Um, writing about how I disagree with his views? Boy, do I. You can call it by any name you want, but gay people ought to be legally entitled to form a legal union in this country, and it's way past time for our laws to guarantee that in every state.
How much difference should a writer's wacko views make to how--or whether--you read his fiction? If someone is notorious in real life, reading about that is obviously almost as much fun as reading what he wrote. Do we still believe in reading things like Lives of the Saints in order to imitate them more perfectly? Consider this poem by Louis Simpson, Lives of the Poets:
Dickinson had a cockatoo
she called Semiramis
and loved dearly.
Whitman was a trencherman,
his favorite dish
a mulligan stew.
Frost went for long walks,
Eliot played croquet,
Pound took fencing lessons.
There is a snapshot of Yeats
in a garden with a woman
naked to the waist and smiling.
Auden when he was old
counted the sheets of toilet paper
that a visitor used.
And speaking of toilet paper, wasn't there something in the entertainment columns a few months ago about how Sheryl Crow wants to ration how much we can use for one visit?
I guess I usually think that a writer's notoriety is beside the point, and the work should be judged on its own merits. But many of my favorite works of literature are topical satires, which can't be removed from their historical context without removing that which makes them comprehensible, much less funny or perceptive or clever.
Does it help you, my readers, to decipher my tone today if I tell you that I had a traffic accident in Columbus yesterday about noon, which didn't hurt any people but damaged my minivan so severely that I couldn't even drive it home, but had to leave it in Columbus awaiting an insurance estimate and then, someday, repairs? And that even though I was the meat in a car sandwich and felt like I couldn't have done anything differently without hurting people, the state trooper who kept us in the noonday sun for two hours gave me a $110 ticket for not having "assured clear distance" from the man ahead of me who threw on his brakes so suddenly that the force of the collision from the car behind me sent the hood of my van partially under his bumper? Did you hear all that in my annoyance today?
Didn't think so. And, of course, I'm not a famous writer. But does it matter--do we need to be always paying attention to "the man behind the curtain" as we read?
Thursday, May 8, 2008
The Latest in YA
YA is such an onomotopoetic acronym, isn't it? I picture 10 to 17 year olds (the target audience for Young Adult books) swinging into the library on vines to return these books, shouting "YA!" at the top of their lungs.
There have been some lively discussions online lately (a summary is available at Bookshelves of Doom) among publishers, librarians, and readers about what should be classified as YA literature and whether adults are embarrassed to browse in that section. I certainly have never been embarrassed to check out the YA section, ever since I found that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (a book that current college students pick overwhelmingly as "most influential") had moved from the SF section to the YA section. And if you want to read Scott Westerfeld, as anyone who likes books with interesting ideas in them should (the discussions note this), you have to go to the YA section.
I can't believe we missed the first day to buy Rick Riordan's newest Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth. I just went out and found it at a local bookstore this morning. If you don't yet own it or the three that precede it, get yourself to a real or virtual bookstore before the week is out!
I loved Edward Bloor's book Tangerine, and I liked Crusader a lot. He manages to integrate contemporary issues with good writing and plots more complicated than usual in YA fiction. So my expectations were high when I found his newest YA title, Story Time, at the library. Perhaps they were too high. I found the reading of the book tedious, even though the issues (standardized testing in schools is the main one) were worth exploring. I'd like to see someone do it better.
Clare B. Dunkle's brand-new The Sky Inside is one of the best post-apocalyptic YA novels I've read since How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. You get thoroughly involved in the present-day mysteries of how the characters live in their domed suburb before you begin to get any answers to why, and the big picture doesn't even begin to be revealed until p. 192. Finally the apocalyptic events are explained on p. 214, and this is the beginning of the explanation:
Close to a hundred years ago, our nation was slowly decaying. Handhelds and robots had just been invented, and that meant factories didn't need so many humans to work in them anymore. The armies didn't need them either, because war was changing, too. Killing people wasn't important. It was which factories and machines you could blow up, and the robots were getting better at doing that than the humans were. All these unneeded people were crowding up the cities--suburbs, you'd call them--eating food and getting sick and demanding medicine. They cost more to keep than they could earn, and they were fouling up the air and water, too. New people were being born every day.
I'm almost sure that this novel was not written in answer to Michael Moore's movie Sicko (the timing is too tight, for one thing). But it presents a very plausible future, and that makes it powerful. Also it has a satisfying ending. I think that's an important qualification for good YA post-apocalyptic novels; they shouldn't just peter out with the idea. They should resolve the crisis somehow. The author should have some vision for this unsatisfactory world.
There have been some lively discussions online lately (a summary is available at Bookshelves of Doom) among publishers, librarians, and readers about what should be classified as YA literature and whether adults are embarrassed to browse in that section. I certainly have never been embarrassed to check out the YA section, ever since I found that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (a book that current college students pick overwhelmingly as "most influential") had moved from the SF section to the YA section. And if you want to read Scott Westerfeld, as anyone who likes books with interesting ideas in them should (the discussions note this), you have to go to the YA section.
I can't believe we missed the first day to buy Rick Riordan's newest Percy Jackson book, The Battle of the Labyrinth. I just went out and found it at a local bookstore this morning. If you don't yet own it or the three that precede it, get yourself to a real or virtual bookstore before the week is out!
I loved Edward Bloor's book Tangerine, and I liked Crusader a lot. He manages to integrate contemporary issues with good writing and plots more complicated than usual in YA fiction. So my expectations were high when I found his newest YA title, Story Time, at the library. Perhaps they were too high. I found the reading of the book tedious, even though the issues (standardized testing in schools is the main one) were worth exploring. I'd like to see someone do it better.
Clare B. Dunkle's brand-new The Sky Inside is one of the best post-apocalyptic YA novels I've read since How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. You get thoroughly involved in the present-day mysteries of how the characters live in their domed suburb before you begin to get any answers to why, and the big picture doesn't even begin to be revealed until p. 192. Finally the apocalyptic events are explained on p. 214, and this is the beginning of the explanation:
Close to a hundred years ago, our nation was slowly decaying. Handhelds and robots had just been invented, and that meant factories didn't need so many humans to work in them anymore. The armies didn't need them either, because war was changing, too. Killing people wasn't important. It was which factories and machines you could blow up, and the robots were getting better at doing that than the humans were. All these unneeded people were crowding up the cities--suburbs, you'd call them--eating food and getting sick and demanding medicine. They cost more to keep than they could earn, and they were fouling up the air and water, too. New people were being born every day.
I'm almost sure that this novel was not written in answer to Michael Moore's movie Sicko (the timing is too tight, for one thing). But it presents a very plausible future, and that makes it powerful. Also it has a satisfying ending. I think that's an important qualification for good YA post-apocalyptic novels; they shouldn't just peter out with the idea. They should resolve the crisis somehow. The author should have some vision for this unsatisfactory world.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Favorite Books
When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.
So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.
A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.
My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.
Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.
With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.
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